September 12 work in progress

Yeah I know, today's the 13th, but this is from yesterday... Doesn't look like much yet but it is! The lines you see, it's actually all dots...

So this is half of the Greatest Generation Project. I've only talked about that a little bit but it's a Colt 1911 and a Bowie knife. These, in case you don't know, are the grips for the 1911.

Lots of people ask me how these projects work, like does a client tell me exactly what to do? It varies, but generally clients come to me with a fairly general idea, and that's the ideal situation for me. I want to know what subject someone wants, but I don't want someone telling me HOW to create that subject. First and foremost I'm still an artist, so I take some serious pride in designing an appealing image.

In this case, I was asked to put General Patton on one side, and General MacArthur on the other. HOW to do that was entirely up to me (with constant feedback and eventual approval, of course, obviously the client is involved in the process). But I design the image. 1911 grips are tricky, being a parallelogram shape and not a rectangle. I had a few ideas that didn't work out before I finally thought of one that did. I'm not going to show you the approved sketches, I'm just going to let these images build up until you can see what I'm doing.



I'll talk more about the second part of the project later, the Bowie knife. I'm still revising sketches for that, it's a tremendous amount of work doing all the foundation work!